Stanley the Ugly Cat
by FuryPossessed
Summary: Stanley the ugly cat arrived at the Howe family's ordinary looking home, one rainy afternoon injured. But this family had one rather large, rather surprising secret. You see, Eve Howe, the middle child was, in fact, a witch. Tried to emulate stylistic features of 'The Tale of the Three Brothers'. Snape makes a brief appearance and is his usual moody self. No dialogue.


p class="MsoNormal"span style="font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;"Stanley was an ugly cat. He had been for as long as Eve had known him. When Stanley had arrived, half starved, at Eve's back door one rainy afternoon in June, he'd been a miserable looking thing. His hair was thin, patchy, falling out, and riddled with fleas. His right eye had been clouded with injury, his left ear missing leaving only one, large, bat like ear to dominate his swollen head. His back-left paw's claws were permanently extended, cracked and chipped. The front left paw had been so broken it curled inwards and he walked on the wrist. /span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;"span style="font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;"Fortunately for Stanley the ugly cat, the home he had stumbled upon belonged to the Howe family. The Howe family was made up of Mr Simon and Mrs Isabel Howe, Geoffrey Howe, Eve Howe and Thomas Howe. Together they looked like a perfectly normal family with no surprises or secrets. /span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;"span style="font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;"But this family had one rather large, rather surprising secret. You see, Eve Howe, the middle child, the child with the boring brown hair and the unassuming grey eyes and the rather solitary, yet delightful, hobby of reading, was, in fact, a witch. She was seventeen years old and went to a school in Scotland for witches and wizards and it was called Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. At this school she took many subjects to make her learned in the magical arts and one of them was potions. It was perhaps her least favourite subject because of her teacher, Professor Snape, but she happened to be rather good at it. /span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;"span style="font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;"This was good for Stanley the ugly cat because when he crept in through the cat flap which had been there since the previous owners had lived here, he was badly in need of medicine if he wanted to live through the night. Eve made a potion to give him strength, another to help care for his cracked skin and patchy hair which also killed all the fleas (an invention of her own made for this specific moment) and she was able to make some skelegrow (a potion to regrow bones, but she had to vanish them before she could give Stanley any of it, a task which she did marvellously). She used a spell on his clouded eye to see if it could be healed, but it couldn't so she vanished the eye and used another spell to make the eyelids seal shut. There was nothing she could do for the chunk of his upper lip that was missing and revealed his teeth, but she did remove the maggots that had taken residence around his now missing eye. The last things she did for Stanley that night were to bathe and feed him. /span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;"span style="font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;"What happened was a rather miraculous recovery. Stanley the ugly cat's hair grew back in a few days. But that is not to say that he became an adorable cat who deserved sympathy. There wasn't a profusion of hair on his head to help hide the missing, muddy green eye and ear. His hair was short and curly, but exceedingly soft. Yet it was a rather boring, dull shade of straw which made him look somewhat pathetic. It was even shorter on his face which was too large for his small head, but too small compared to his strong nose and all that was far too small for even just his one large ear. His back was arched, his legs spindly, his tail rather thin and whip like. He had an arched back, his paws looked too big for his legs and he had far too many toes. /span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;"span style="font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;"He was still an ugly cat. He was grizzled and scarred and that was why he was called Stanley. He needed a strong name to compete with his unfortunately rememberable appearance. /span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;"span style="font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;"Even so, he was a loving cat. He liked to chase feathers on pits of string, played with Grandma's knitting wool when she visited, curled around your legs as you walked. He frightened the grumpy old neighbour by appearing in the window as she walked by. He paced and looked at her until she was out of sight. As soon as she was gone, he would leap back down to the floor and then back onto the sofa to curl up in the warmth of Eve's lap. /span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;"span style="font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;"Within a week of being with the Howe family, Stanley the ugly cat became, simply, Stanley. /span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;"span style="font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;"The only thing the family did not like about Stanley was his insistence on bringing in nearly dead animals – mice that were still feebly squeaking, birds that could still flap their wings but not fly, moles that bled all over the floor and frogs that tried to hop through windows but ended up splayed across them. He then sat proudly in the corner of the room and watch as his humans who were normally incapable of hunting tracked down and got rid of his carefully selected offerings. /span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;"span style="font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;"He thought they made an awful fuss about it. Mrs Howe screamed, Mr Howe got annoyed and looked angrily at him. Geoffrey thought it was terribly amusing and called Thomas down who usually ended up being sick or fainting which made Mr and Mrs Howe shout at him and call him an "awful rotter". Then, at last, Eve would come into the room, annoyed that her sojourn into the lives of other people contained in her books and imagination had been interrupted. She simply sighed, used a spell to stun the unfortunate creature, took it outside and then cleaned up with another spell. /span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;"span style="font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;"'Then, when calm was restored to the house, Stanley would stretch out on the sofa, purr and lick his feet in a self-satisfied manor that amused Eve, but annoyed the rest of the household. Eve would then lie on the sofa with her book and Stanley would lie on her chest with his head in the crook of her neck, and he would fall asleep. /span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;"span style="font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;"When at last the summer holidays were over and Eve had to go back to Hogwarts, the family made their goodbyes and Eve got on a wizarding train on King's Cross Station's Platform 9¾, a secret platform that most muggles (non-magical people) didn't know existed. The family said goodbye on the platform and no one thought anything out of the ordinary had happened. /span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;"span style="font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;"That is until part way through the journey when Stanley was seen sauntering down the carriages looking for his human. Sure that he'd been left in the kitchen at home, Eve was surprised to see him. /span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;"span style="font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;"Her friends called Stanley the ugliest cat they had ever seen, and though she agreed, Eve loved her ugly cat more than any other pet she'd ever had. /span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;"span style="font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;"Together at Hogwarts, they were all but inseparable. Her teachers, with the exception of one, let Stanley lie across the front of her desk, in the classroom windows or by the room's fire. He followed her in the corridors and even into the Great Hall where the entire school ate their meals. /span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;"span style="font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;"One Saturday near the end of the spring term, Stanley went missing. Eve looked high and low for her friend for hours. Her friends helped and so did the magical, moving portraits that hung on the castle walls (with the exception of the overly dramatic, wailing Fat Lady who feared for Stanley's life) for all the people in them had become somewhat fond of the ugly cat. As the search went on, other students and members of staff said they would keep an eye out for him. span style="mso-spacerun: yes;" /span/span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;"span style="font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;"Late in the evening the potions professor heard the commotion of the now desperate search, came out of his classroom and, by way of a reluctant student, summoned Eve down to see him. Equally reluctantly, she left the search and went to see what the man wanted. He was the teacher who didn't let Stanley into his classroom and ignored the cat's very existence. /span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;"span style="font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;"Eve entered his classroom and who should she see but none other than Stanley? He trotted over to her looking very pleased with himself and curled around her legs. Eve picked him up and scalded him. When the professor said that he'd somehow got into his potion store, nearly died and he'd been fighting to keep the cat alive for hours, she said she should call him Stanley the very naughty cat. Eve thanked the professor over and over and promised to be much better at getting her homework done and would pay for any potions and ingredients that Stanley had needed./span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;"span style="font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;"The professor then said that he'd better not see the cat in his potions store ever again and dismissed Eve and her mangy cur. /span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.45pt;"span style="font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;"Soon enough, Eve finished her education at Hogwarts and, still thankful to the professor for finding her cat, she went into the big wide world which was a scary place, but not quite so scary with Stanley by her side. /span/p


End file.
